‘Breath of the Wild’ disappoints

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Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW) is a game with a massive open-world with unrewarding side-quests and a grand total of four dungeons.

I played through this game on the Wii U and beat it in about a week.

The weapon durability that was introduced to me at the beginning was not something I was initially happy to see. Soon after it turned out to not be such a bad mechanic because Nintendo made it so that the way you get more weapons is by defeating foes. I grew to like this concept because it encouraged me to go inside of shrines, which has strong weapons to be looted.

These shrines also served the purpose of obtaining more health and stamina for yourself. When I first found out about this, I was skeptical if I were to prefer this over doing side-quests.

The main reason I did not end up liking this feature is because I would much rather do sidequests and get rewarded health or stamina for helping people.

The graphics in Breath of the Wild were not particularly amazing, but Nintendo somehow managed to make the game not look terrible with the art style that they used.

The draw distance for this game was great. I am happy to see that they managed to make it look so far.

Unfortunately, the framerate suffers often on the Wii U. There are many times when the framerate will drop well below 30.

This annoyed me when I would fight enemies and it would turn the game into a slideshow. Thankfully, the dungeons did not have this issue, but they still disappointed.

The dungeons for BotW are short, and there are only four of them.

Zelda always shined when it came to the creativity of bosses and dungeon layouts.

Unfortunately for BotW, the dungeons are all the same concept with all the same type of bosses.

All the dungeons are the same concept with the same color palette, but with a different shape. When you enter a dungeon, the first thing you do is grab a map of the place, and then you have control of the dungeon in order to turn it in a way to activate terminals. There are five terminals in each dungeon and then almost immediately after, you fight the boss.

It would be creative and interesting if Nintendo did not decide to have the same design for every dungeon. It got to the point that I did not want to do the dungeons because they all felt like a chore instead of exploring an unfamiliar place.

In order to get the full story for BotW, I would have to explore the map and run into this one person that would give me hints to find Link’s lost memories. I did not have the patience to find every memory after finding eight of them.

Nintendo also lacked creativity in the items that were not melee weapons or bows. The game gives you three “runes” that are: bombs, stopping time for objects, and moving magnetic objects around. You can upgrade each of these runes once, which felt lazy because you use the same items for every puzzle in the game. It gets boring fast.